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Trip Treats Africa as Land of Promise, Troubles Aside

Before leaving Africa, President Obama bounced a battery-charging ball off his head Tuesday outside a power plant in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania — The Africa trip that President Obama could have taken would have looked very different.

He could have stopped in Kenya to deliver tough words to its president, who has been charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court, accused of orchestrating politically motivated death squads.

He could have gone to Nigeria to address both the Islamist militancy shaking the region and the human rights abuses committed by American partners in the effort to contain it. And he could have traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo to demonstrate his commitment to ending the violence that has plagued it for so many years.

Instead, Mr. Obama chose an itinerary that was largely safe and heartwarming. His three-nation tour of sub-Saharan Africa, which ended Tuesday, avoided hot spots in favor of places where development is succeeding, investment is increasing and democracy is, in at least two of the cases, well established.

Aides traveling with the president said the trip, Mr. Obama’s first extended visit as president, had been designed to accentuate the positive on a continent too often dismissed as beyond help. The destinations were chosen, they said, to provide a forum for him to talk about a new model for helping Africa, one that emphasizes partnership and investment over aid and dependency.

“The entire purpose of the trip is to lift up our efforts on the affirmative opportunities in Africa — trade, investment, democratization and impactful development programs,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser and one of Mr. Obama’s top foreign-policy advisers.

A focus on terrorism and ethnic violence would have done little more, he said, than “reinforce negative stereotypes of a continent in permanent crisis.”

Some of Mr. Obama’s optimism on the trip was overshadowed by anxiety over the health of Nelson Mandela, the 94-year-old former South African leader, who remained in critical condition in a Pretoria hospital. Mr. Obama spent much of his time in Africa expressing his concern about Mr. Mandela and competing for the news media’s attention.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama repeatedly delivered a hopeful message. In Senegal, he spoke excitedly about new technologies that enable farmers to quadruple their yields. In Tanzania, he announced programs to provide reliable electricity to those still in the dark and prevent poachers from trafficking in wildlife. And in Cape Town, he told students that they represented the future of a continent on the move.

“From microfinance projects in Kampala to stock traders in Lagos to cellphone entrepreneurs in Nairobi, there is an energy here that can’t be denied — Africa rising,” Mr. Obama said.

Mr. Obama and his advisers say what Africa needs now are not more lectures from an American president or declarations about the dangers of war and other violence. What Africans need, they say, is a president willing to put the weight of his office behind the less attention-grabbing programs that will help secure the food supply, improve education, clear the way for trade and promote efficient government.

Photo

President Obama and former President George W. Bush attended a ceremony in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, to mark the memory of those killed by a terrorist bomb 15 years ago.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times

That contention has fueled a debate about what Africa needs more: a president who directly confronts the challenges of a continent, warts and all, or one who sidesteps the negative on his visit to try to inspire a better future.

Critics of Mr. Obama, particularly in Africa, say he missed opportunities to use his influence as America’s first African-American president to shine light on the misdeeds of nations and leaders who are holding back progress. They say Mr. Obama passed up a chance to deliver a speech in Kenya, his father’s homeland, that could have underlined America’s disappointment in the actions of Uhuru Kenyatta, its president, and other African strongmen.

Instead of traveling to South Africa, where Mr. Obama and his family took the expected tour of Mr. Mandela’s jail cell on Robben Island, critics say, he could have gone to Malawi or Liberia, two nations with female presidents, to highlight the successes and challenges of women on the continent.

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Critics also point to Nigeria, the most populous nation in sub-Saharan Africa, as an obvious choice for a president interested in shaping the continent’s future.

“It seems to me a real oversight not to visit Nigeria,” said Mwangi S. Kimenyi, a Kenyan scholar at the Brookings Institution. “I would have thought that whoever helped plan for the trip or for the president, in a strategic way, would have included Nigeria. It’s a very important country, and it’s likely going to overtake some other economies in Africa.”

Mr. Obama’s advisers pointed out last week that security concerns in some of these places made travel there exceedingly difficult. And they insist that the president did not altogether avoid the challenges that Africa faces. In the Cape Town speech, he noted that “from Congo to Sudan, conflicts fester — robbing men, women and children of the lives that they deserve.”

More broadly, Mr. Obama’s advisers argue that his critics have an outdated view of how America can best provide leadership.

Mr. Rhodes recalled the speech that Mr. Obama gave last month at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, where a wall once stood as a concrete symbol of oppression. In part, the wall came down because of high-minded speeches, Mr. Rhodes said. But now, he argued, the challenge is different.

The president repeatedly described opportunities for economic partnership as a victory for both Africa and America.

As he finished his trip, Mr. Obama visited a once-idle power plant in Dar es Salaam that a partnership between American business and the Tanzanian government had brought back to life. Mr. Obama’s administration has agreed to spend $7 billion — and recruited $9 billion from businesses — in an effort to double access to electricity in Africa.

In a more whimsical display of solutions, Mr. Obama tried out a soccer ball that stores kinetic activity in a battery during use and later provides electricity to power a lamp or charge a cellphone.

“I don’t want to get too technical, but I thought it was pretty cool,” he said, at one point bouncing the ball on his head. “You can imagine this in villages all across the continent.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 3, 2013, on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: Trip Treats Africa as Land Of Promise, Troubles Aside. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe